The $6.74 That Made Me Build a Ticketing Company

A while back I was looking at tickets for a local event. The ticket was $75. When I got to checkout, Eventbrite had added $6.74 in fees on top. Nearly 9% of what I was paying was Eventbrite's fee.

I closed the tab and didn't go to the show.

I kept thinking about that. The organizer had done the work. They booked the act, promoted the event, handled the logistics. Eventbrite hosted a checkout form. And based on their published pricing, Eventbrite earned revenue from every ticket sold without taking on the risks of producing the event.

That seemed wrong.

What Eventbrite's Published Pricing Actually Adds Up To

Under Eventbrite's public self-service pricing as of 2026, the fee structure is: a service fee of 3.7% plus $1.79 per ticket, plus a 2.9% payment processing fee per order.

The service fee (the 3.7% plus $1.79) is Eventbrite's platform revenue. The processing fee covers payment infrastructure, the same underlying cost any platform passes through.

Here's what that service fee looks like across a real event, based on their published rates:

$25 ticket:

$50 ticket:

The $1.79 fixed component hits hardest on lower-priced tickets. On a $15 ticket, the service fee alone is $2.34, which is 15.6% of the ticket price before payment processing is even added. The smaller the event, the worse the deal.

From an attendee's perspective, all of it shows up at checkout as fees tacked on after the price they came in expecting to pay. On a $25 ticket, they're paying $27.72. That $2.72 didn't go to the organizer. It went to the platform.

The Empower Question

Around the same time I came across a story about a rideshare company called Empower. Uber and Lyft were taking 25-30% of every fare. A founder named Joshua Sear asked a simple question: what if we just charged drivers a flat software subscription instead? Drivers kept 100% of their fares. Riders paid 20% less on average. The only thing that changed was the business model.

I kept turning that question over. Could you do the same thing with ticketing?

The commission model in ticketing isn't tied directly to the underlying cost of processing a payment. It's a business model choice. A bad one.

A Different Model

Equaticket is a flat subscription. Up to 50 tickets per month is free. Above that, the starter plan is $29 a month and covers up to 250 tickets per month, which works out to $0.116 per ticket at that ceiling. There is no per-ticket service fee on top of that. There is no platform take on your revenue.

Payment processing still exists, because it always does. But here's the part that matters: with Equaticket, organizers connect their own Stripe account directly. Payments go straight to you. Equaticket is not in the middle of your money. You own that relationship with Stripe, which also means you own your payout schedule, your dispute process, and your transaction history. The platform isn't holding your revenue and remitting it to you later.

The subscription covers the software. What you sell stays yours. That's not a promotion. It's the business model.

Here's how that compares on the same events above, platform cost only:

$25 ticket:

At 250 tickets on the starter plan, Equaticket's cost is $0.116 per ticket. At 1,000 tickets on the growth tier, it's $0.079 per ticket. Under Eventbrite's published rate, the service fee on a $25 ticket is $2.72 regardless of volume.

There's also a structural difference worth naming. With a percentage-based ticketing platform, the platform earns more every time you raise your ticket prices. Their revenue grows with yours. With Equaticket, the software costs what it costs whether you're selling a $10 ticket or a $500 ticket. The platform isn't taking a larger cut of your success as you scale. That's a fundamentally different alignment between what's good for the platform and what's good for you.

The Real Problem Isn't Fees. It's Surprise.

The piece I keep coming back to isn't really about the dollar amount. It's about the moment.

When I closed that Eventbrite checkout, the thing that bothered me wasn't just the $6.74. It was the feeling of being quoted one price and charged another. I had decided the show was worth $75. I hadn't decided it was worth $81.74. That's a different calculation, and I didn't get to make it until I was already three steps into checkout.

That feeling has a name. It's the same reason people hate airline baggage fees. You find a $200 flight, you book it mentally, you start planning your trip, and then you discover the flight actually costs $270 once they add the checked bag, the seat selection, the carry-on upgrade. The price you saw wasn't the price.

Hotel resort fees work the same way. The room is $189 a night. Then at checkout you learn there's a $45 resort fee, mandatory, non-negotiable, covering amenities you may never use. The hotel didn't hide it exactly, but they didn't lead with it either.

Ticketing fees follow the exact same playbook. List a price that looks reasonable. Wait until someone is invested in attending, has made plans, maybe already told their friends, and then reveal the actual number at the last step. Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: by the time the final price appears, many buyers have already invested enough time and attention that they pay it rather than start over.

This is not a small annoyance. Research on checkout abandonment consistently points to unexpected costs as the leading reason people don't complete purchases online. Recent regulatory scrutiny around so-called "junk fees" reflects a broader recognition that consumers prefer upfront pricing and transparency, and that the gap between the advertised price and the final price carries real costs beyond the transaction itself. Organizers are losing sales they don't even know they're losing, to a fee structure they didn't choose and can't easily explain to the people who walked away.

The thing is, it doesn't have to work this way. When you order food through a restaurant's own website, the price on the menu is what you pay. When you buy directly from a local shop, there's no "local shop convenience fee" added at checkout. The idea that buying a ticket to a concert or a workshop or a community event requires a surprise line item that benefits neither the organizer nor the attendee is purely a product of how a handful of large platforms structured their business models.

Organizers didn't choose that model. They inherited it. And most of them have no idea how much it's costing them in lost conversions on top of the direct fee revenue it pulls from every sale.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The hope behind keeping platform costs this low is that some of those savings find their way to attendees. Not through a mandate, but through a shift in what's practical for organizers to offer.

Some costs can't be stripped away entirely. Payment processing is a real expense that every platform passes through in some form. But there's a difference between a cost that exists and a cost that gets presented as a surprise at checkout. Our encouragement to organizers is to bundle everything into one clear, all-inclusive ticket price.

When organizers opt into that approach on Equaticket, we add a "✓ No booking fees" badge to their checkout page so attendees know upfront that what they see is what they'll pay. No line items. No reveal at the last step.

The reason an organizer on a per-ticket fee platform often can't do this is simple: if the platform is taking $2.72 out of every $25 ticket, absorbing that cost means eating into margin they may not have. When the platform cost is a flat $29 a month, the math changes. Bundling processing into the ticket price becomes a real option rather than a sacrifice.

That's the cultural shift we're trying to encourage. Not a policy, not a requirement, just a model that makes all-inclusive pricing easier to choose. Event tickets shouldn't behave differently than any other thing you buy online. The price is the price.

Where Things Stand

Equaticket is still early. I'm one person building this, which is also why the economics work the way they do. I'm not managing investors or quarterly earnings calls. I'm building a tool I think should exist and pricing it the way software should be priced: as software, not as a toll on every ticket you sell.

The features are real: ticket sales, embeds for your own website, check-in and QR scanning, attendee management, promo codes, free and paid ticket types, recurring events. The list keeps growing.

If you're running events and want to know what you'd save, check out our savings calculator, where you can see just how much you could save vs the other ticketing platforms. Or sign up and try it free for up to 50 tickets a month. No credit card required.

Start free at equaticket.com — free up to 50 tickets/month, starter plan $29/month.

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Sources:

• Eventbrite fee structure: Eventbrite Organizer Pricing, eventbrite.com; Eventbrite Fees 2026, checkoutpage.com
• Empower rideshare: Empower origin story, Startup Savant
• Ticketmaster fee history: Why does Ticketmaster charge such high fees?, Marketplace.org, May 2026